Lapsang Souchong Star (Organic)

Super duper smokey. Pure campfire. But, I get a hint of sweetness. This is definitely a tea that has to be savored slowly and in small doses.

My first lapsang souchong! I fell in love with the “campfire in a cup” aroma when I smelled it in the David’s Tea shop a few years back. This one has a robustly smoky nose, but a counter-intuitively smooth and silky flavor with hardly any bitterness. Very refined and balanced, for all that lapsang is a love-it-or-hate-it. I’ve repurchased this several times.

Oh my… wow.

This tea has had last night. Talk about smokey!! Wow. It was like drinking a liquid campfire. So smokey! It’s not my thing at all, but I do want to try it as a marinade or a seasoning for a meat of some kind. If I can find a good recipe, then this Wednesday we’re going to make it.

This has got to be one of my favorite varieties of tea. The intense, but smooth, aromas and flavors are not everyone’s cup of tea — you either love it or you hate it. I love it. The aroma carries beautifully, you need not stick your nose in the tin – but gently waft towards the face. I love cupping this tea for people, seeing there eyes light up at first sip! This tea reminds me of smoked salmon, whiskey and campfire. I find that if brewed just right you can skip the bitterness (not that you always want to) and have the flavours gently wane away with only a ghost of the original haunting your nasal cavities.

It is really cold in Boston today, and I found myself craving this tea. It’s like my own personal fireplace!

Mixed this with cinnamon rooibos chai again today. It’s ok, I still like the combination of smoky and spicy, but there’s something not quite right about it. Not sure if it’s that the lapsang base doesn’t have enough flavour underneath all that smoke, or if the flavouring in the chai is bugging me. Or maybe my tastebuds are just messed up from this cold. :)

In the Manitoba Museum, there’s a replica of a merchant ship from the 1600s, called the Nonsuch. The replica was commissioned by the Hudson Bay Company and was built using tools and materials from the time, to be as authentic as possible. It occupies a special gallery designed to evoke the feeling of being at port, and you can walk onto the ship and explore certain parts of it.

As a child this was always one of my favourite parts of the museum. It’s very immersive and feels a bit melancholy.

Smell is one of our most powerful sensory triggers of memory, and the smell of this tea immediately takes me to my visits to the museum. It smells and tastes exactly the way that ship smells – sharp notes of pine and smoke, hints of tar, and a feeling of agedness. Also reminiscent of bonfires on cool autumn nights, and fireplaces.

The pine and smoke are strong but not overwhelming. They don’t linger over long on the finish, and there’s no unpleasant burnt or charcoal aspects to this tea.

The mouth feel is nice and smooth. Thick but not astringent.

This won’t be for everyone but I love it a whole lot.

I absolutely hated this fake smoke tea. It contaminates everything it touches, and leaves the whole kitchen reeking of smoke. I was ready to write off LS altogether… but then I tried a real LS from Tea Classico which is really smoked over pine wood, and was soooo much more natural and subtle. The difference between the fakey ‘smoke-flavour’ and the actual, natural pine smoke was like night and day. I’m not a sales-rep or anything… I just couldn’t believe such a difference. This one from DAVIDs …. I couldn’t drink it… used it for cooking meatloaf, and it was still overpowering and bad!!

Oh man, so the quest to try the weirdest/most ill advised tea pop today definitely went well. I had this one in mind when I went into the store and it’s what the sales associate suggested anyway so I went with this one.

Man does Lapsang stink; she opened the tin up to make it and the whole time all I could think was “I fucked up!”. And of course, if we’re gonna do a tea pop might as well do it “properly” so there was Agave in this too. She agreed this was/is the weirdest one she’s ever made for someone. If nothing else I felt like we both got a good story out of the experience.

I will say this; it was bad but not as bad as I expected it to be. It was kinda like drinking carbonated bacon or tobacco. Which is a very weird sensation. I think it should be obvious I didn’t finish it; but I did drink more than half of it and that seems like an accomplishment to me!

I felt a wee bit nauseous after it, but I think it was still worth it just to say I’d done it!

Bought 10 grams of this along with some of David’s other straight blacks – my plan is to try out their varieties and see which flavour profiles I like best, and then order higher quality versions from Mandala or Teavivre.

As for this… Not sure how I feel about it. Its interesting. Don’t know if I’d bother to brew it up again any time soon but I wouldn’t reject a cup if offered. Definitely something that requires a certain mood and atmosphere.

Steeped in simmering water for 5 minutes. The taste is not bitter at all, but obviously very smoky. The dry smell reminded me of smoked salted herring and cigars, but I taste no fishyness in the liquor, thankfully. The actual taste reminds me of when I went camping with friends and we used pinecones as campfire starters – it tastes like smoke from pine and pine resin. Somewhat oily thick taste with a hint of sweetness under that smoke. Very full in the mouth.